Now let me say immediately that I already know what your first reaction to the above title is, typical Chronicle commenter! You’re thinking “here goes this beta-male again with that oversensitive, safe-space-seeking, bedwetting, lib-tard political correctness so typical of Duke’s cry-baby culture.” You may also have followed that thought up by quoting a passage from the Constitution.
And partially, you would be right. Being as I neither lead a herd nor regularly sire new sets of children with each of the women in my dorm, I am surely ineligible to be considered an alpha male and, alas, must therefore be a beta. (The fact I observe queuing customs and don’t feel I have a right to other people’s bodies probably doesn’t help in that regard, either.)
But funnily enough, my support for the singular “they” doesn’t originate in social justice matters. As it happens, it originates in a simple matter of practicality.
For those who aren’t aware, The Chronicle—like a great many other publications—uses the AP Stylebook as the source for its house style. This is why you’ll never see an Oxford comma in The Chronicle nor will you ever see a number above nine rendered in letters. What bothers me about AP style (besides the Oxford comma thing), though, is that it makes use of the “generic he.”
Here’s an example of the generic he in action: “Anyone, no matter who he is, has at some point cried while watching the 1998 classic kids’ cartoon, "PB&J Otter." They’re noodle dancing in Heaven now.” Another: “The reader of this column is probably not aware that 10 percent of the cost of his tuition is actually just there to make Duke look more prestigious than Stanford.”
If we observe the rule closely enough, we can accidentally create sentences that sound rather more unorthodox than they might have been otherwise.
“Hey Bron, do you know whose these tampons and sanitary pads are?”
“Nah, but he’s gonna have to come and pick them up before housekeeping puts them in the trash.”
Perhaps you would reply that, in the above case, it’s obvious the anonymous individual is female because only women own tampons and that one could therefore reasonably substitute “he” for “she” while still adhering to the generic he rule. In that case, I would have you know that, regardless of your gender, bunches of tampons bundled in mason jars can make for wonderful artificial house plants if your apartment is feeling a little under-decorated. That’s presumably why most states tax tampons as luxury items.
It’s important to point out that the issues arising from use of the generic he aren’t just hypothetical. When I was writing anonymously for The Chronicle last semester, I hit upon a number of instances in which the singular they was sorely needed but not permissible under AP style. For example, while writing about both the homophobic death threat and racist graffiti, I was unable to use the singular they—unfortunate, because in both cases the perpetrators were anonymous. Using the generic he here quietly implied the culprit was a man—totally overlooking the possibility “they” might have been a different gender or indeed a group of people. To have been able to use “they” in this situation would have erased the problem altogether.
Defenders of AP style might point out that in such cases saying “he or she” might be permissible instead of he. But come on, people; “he or she” is a clunky phrase to have to keep saying. In real life, what would you be more likely to say—“his or her tampons” or simply the crisper, more satisfying “their tampons”? Truly, it is the latter that feels more pleasant to the tongue.
“Bron!” you may scream melodiously at your laptop, “I agree with you on most of your points, but the singular they is grammatically incorrect!”
If I were to miraculously hear your tuneful shrieking from the future, I would probably respond that that’s not a particularly strong point. For one thing, people use the singular they in conversation all the time. More significantly, it’s not even a well-established rule; they has been used in the singular for centuries, making appearances in such luminaries of the English canon as the King James Bible and the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Austen. From what I can tell, it only seems to have become verboten in writing when a bunch of uppity grammarians decided it was improper in the past two centuries or so.
Increasingly the singular they is gaining acceptance in written word communities. The American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year for 2015 was the singular they and, more relevantly for The Chronicle, The Washington Post last year decided to end its ban on the plucky pronoun. For both institutions, the increasing visibility of trans issues was a driving factor in the decision. As more individuals stray from the gender binary, the English language has to expand to accommodate them; “they” often does the job nicely. Duke is as subject to these trends as anywhere—and as more trans students arrive or come out on campus, the need for gender-neutral language in its paper of record will only grow.
Now I don’t want to make out as though this is an example of The Chronicle obstinately standing in the way of progress; the generic he and AP style are very widely used and it’s natural to stick to convention. But the generic he is a relic of the past and one that literally places men as preeminent over everyone else. Its time, I think we can all agree, is up.
Oh, and before an online Chronicle commentator says it, I’ll address this point: this is not a matter of Orwellian language control. This is a matter of adding language, of making our language more expressive to the benefit of the wider range of human experience now on show. Nobody’s taking away your ability to refer to yourself as a man, typical Chronicle commenter; they just wish you’d stop assuming they were one.
Bron Maher is a Trinity senior. His column runs on alternate Wednesdays.
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